Lisa Bright and Dark ! I totally read that one too. But it wasn't an assignment.

erin - i just wanted to say that Roy Dotrice is reading A Dance with Dragons.

Happy Dance of Jubilation! I'm still listening to _Feast_ cuz my reading time is devoted to _deadline_ and i just can't give up partway into the story. It's improving, he's corrected some the name pronunciations. I can't believe the editors didn't go back and update the earlier transgressions!

I read Lisa, Bright and Dark in fifth grade, I think. Loved it, but it was sort the lighter version of I Never Promised You a Rose Garden.

I hated the endless camping of Deathly Hallows. Felt like filler, and the book was plenty long enuf to not need filler.

I clearly remember reading (and re-reading) _Go Ask Alice_ and also avoiced drug use in large part because of that. Very effective.

Oh - to continue the saga of my trying to get Deadline - release date was officially May 31, but the local Barnes & Noble (only bookstore downtown at this point) said it was June 1. When I went down on June 2 to pick up a copy, it was nowhere to be found. I had two people looking for it - seemingly, it was hidden somewhere in their back area. When I went down at lunchtime to get something else, I checked - it's STILL not on the shelves. grrrr

Grr! I'm sorry you're having such trouble finding it! Hell, a couple local Oakland bookstores had it on Tuesday, so step up, Barnes and Noble!

You should come here for the release party at Borderlands on Saturday. They will have lots of copies!

My Doylist explanation

Doylist? Like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle? Because you're solving a mystery? I haven't heard this one before.

When I was a teenager, I read a lot of mysteries (Agatha Christie, E.W. Hildick, Mary Higgins Clark) and horror (Christopher Pike, R.L Stine, Stephen King, Dean Koontz) and fantasy (Patricia C. Wrede, Jane Yolen, Bruce Coville...most of the stuff I read when I was a pre-teen, really; I never really graduated to "grown-up" fantasy) and thrillers (Dean Koontz, James Patterson, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child). I don't know that I ever felt like anything I read was therapeutic, but even if I didn't know it at the time, I suppose it's clear my reading choices were very escapist.

I love Linda Holmes and she is my new hero.

Although, when I was ranting about the WSJ's gender-segregated lists ("and they said that ONLY BOYS should read Farenheit 451 !!!"), my friend replied, "So, girls should burn their copies?"

Which is really all that needs to be said about the WSJ article.

Oh, I have a copy - as I said, I had TWO "sales associates" (aka retail peons) ransacking the store and one finally came up with a copy ... my very own copy, my precious. I just think it's rotten that, after I'd waited until the release date so her first week's sales would be recorded, B&N (damn them) has their copies hidden in the back.

I have read most of the YA books listed in this thread.

Doylist? Like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle? Because you're solving a mystery?

Nope, it's a shorthand for two ways of looking at the text: from the outside, thinking of the text as a product of a writer; or from the inside, thinking of the text as from within the world it creates.

So the first way is Doylist, because I know that Arthur Conan Doyle wrote the Sherlock Holmes stories.

The second way is Watsonian, in which I accept that Dr. John Watson experienced these adventures and is telling me about them.

A Doylist interpretation of the bogged-down narrative in Deathly Hallows is that JKR seemed too bound by the structure she had established, and couldn't figure out a way to keep the pacing up. A Watsonian interpretation is that it really was that difficult to find the horcruxes, and Harry wasn't smart enough to figure out how to do it more quickly.

Ah, so much the same way we use "meta reasons" when we discuss TV.

Doylish: Giles left for much of the sixth season because ASH wanted to go to London.

Watsonian: Giles left because Buffy needed to be left without her watcher in order to continue growing up as a slayer.